I don’t think he fears being murdered by Putin; he fears being bankrupted by him and having documents turned over to federal prosecutors that would incriminate him and put him and his children in jail for life.
The purpose of the trip was to serve their oligarchal masters in America, who have been wanting to have a better relationship with oligarchs in Russia. Russia doesn’t control the US without its consent; they have waded into American politics because the billionaire class sees Putin as a tool in helping them destroy democracy, which is what many people in our own country have wanted for years. The disease, the rot…it started from within.
I seriously doubt that Trump fears Russia is gonna whack him or his family. What he fears is the big unveiling that he’s been laundering probably billions of dollars in rubles for his puppet masters, and that he and his family are going to jail in the US of A.
Even if you believe Russia would do an overt act of war in America on the family of the President Trump, even I would say there has to be some sort of retaliation and retribution. Regardless of what I think, do you think a narcissist like Trump really cares if Jared or a niece gets poisoned?
Good article by the New Yorker’s editor in chief about the aftermath of the summit:
I had not been aware of the bit mentioned in passing at the beginning – that Trump considers insufficiently enthusiastic applause for him to be “treasonous”. I believe Kim Jong Un feels the same way (about himself, that is).
ETA: One had the balls to shout “you lie” at President Obama during the SotU; none of them have even that much courage to call Trump out for what he is.
The part I bolded quite gets my goat. Never heard of FreedomWorks before. Sounds Orwellian enough. That the repuke-icans can foist this off as a, huh?..win for free speech? is just plain lobotomized tooletry.
Also from the article:
Ah, the serendipity of shit. Funny how…stuff…just seems to, I dunno, work out like that, sometimes.
Sure, AP should’ve gone with the latter. Sometimes the odd PBS Newshour i-view, especially with someone gross like Marc Short (bon voyage!) or Matt Schlapp, has had a softball-y question or two, and I’d get all “Judy!**…really?”
I think you’re both underestimating the fragility of Loser Donald’s ego and his particular fear of the pee tape.
Firstly, Donald almost certainly believes the tape exists. You’ll recall he specifically instructed Comey to investigate whether it was real or not. That’s not the act of someone who has never paid a hooker for a golden shower party.
Secondly, Donald is severely threatened by any implication that any aspect of him isn’t great or terrific or the best (witness his 30-year tantrum over the size of his hands). The existence of a tape would be proof that someone had to be paid to do sex stuff to him, which would mean he’s not the ladies’ man he makes himself out to be. If he’s in any state of undress, it’ll also show how obese and unattractive he is. It could show even worse - maybe that he has a small penis, maybe that he can’t get it up, maybe he gets peed on himself, maybe he gets grossed out and throws up (and illness is just another sign of weakness to him.)
Russia wouldn’t have to try to kill him or expose his finances to destroy him. All they’d have to do is reveal that tape to the world and it’d be incontrovertible proof of his loser-ness that no amount of screaming “FAKE NEWS!” would be able to deny.
“Still better than Crooked Hillary. Now, let’s get on with getting rid o’ them evil Muslims and the Mexicans who keep raping our white women.” is how his supporters will respond. I doubt the rest of the world would be more disgusted than they already are. His sexual peccadilloes don’t concern me nearly as much as pretty much everything else that statistical anomaly of a president has done.
The historical anecdote reminds me of past Presidential responses to such crises. Who can forget FDR’s stirring statement “Emperor Hirohito was extremely strong and powerful in his denial today” or JFK’s firm “I accept our intelligence community’s conclusion that Russia placed missiles in Cuba – could be other people also” or GWB’s definitive “I don’t see any reason why it wouldn’t be al-Qaeda”.
The importance of this cannot be overstated. Trump has spent over three decades working his image as a ladies’ man, and it’s VERY important to a lot of his base. Search Twitter, or message boards that love him, and the idea that Trump must be successful because beautiful women love him is a surprisingly common thing. They’ll post pictures of Trump with a bunch of models and say “look, he’s awesome.” The fact the models are paid to be there is something they then deny; nope, those are women who just love him, you see. I’m not kidding.
Dude, Putin doesn’t humiliate his enemies. Putin doesn’t have enemies. Putin has tools. And when those tools are no longer useful, or if, like a broken hammer, they become a possible source of harm, he discards them. Have you not been paying attention to the trail of corpses that he’s left behind over the past 20 years or so? That wasn’t done out of hate or spite; it was pure self-interest.
Donald Trump doesn’t fear being “destroyed”; his ego doesn’t allow him to believe he can be “destroyed”. But it can be made very, VERY clear to even that kind of man that he can watch his family die, knowing that he is responsible and, most importantly to that kind of man, that he will be last.
The kompromat sets things up. Trump’s ego allows him to believe he can make lemons out of lemonade, so he goes along. Now he’s in deep, but he can’t back out because it’ll cost everything: the Trump family lineage would be lucky to continue.
Okay, but even a ladies man knows that if he wants a golden shower with multiple women in the same room peeing on him or each other, or on the furniture marking their territory, then he’s probably gonna have to pay for it. He could just as easily convince himself that he’s one of the few people in the world who can afford and organize such an event. It’s like something out of one of Nero’s infamous orgies. And maybe by ‘paying’ for it, that was just one of the expenses involved in the party. It’s not like some single or divorced 50-something staying at a Holiday Inn and having to pay 10-20% of his weekly take-home pay to get an ‘escort’.
I could be wrong, but I don’t think this really keeps Donald up at night, which is not to say that he would want it leaked. After all, what is seen cannot be unseen. But this is the guy who was caught on tape bragging about sexual assault, and his republican allies in congress have consistently and increasingly shown a remarkable ability to suspend reality and make excuses for essentially anything the man does. He brags about grabbing women in the pussy. He uses foul language. He makes references to Mike Brzesinski and Megyn Kelly having blood coming out of their whatever. His legions of rednecks simply don’t care. They’re fighting a culture war, and he is their Beowulf. He could claim the tape is doctored, or that he was drugged - his people would still probably forgive him for it.
The only thing Trump has to do - and this is critical - is to keep winning, to keep his voters in farm country, coal country, and white suburbia believing that there’s hope for a return to America, the idyllic place that it used to be in their minds. Trump’s Waterloo will, in my estimation, be confronting the consequences of his gross incompetence. There will come a point at which people will realize how destructive he has been, because they will be living with the pain. They might not immediately blame Trump for causing their misery, but they will absolutely blame him if he can’t fix it - and trust me, he can’t.
